The effect of the frequency of verbal forms in teaching and the sentence production with the verb gustar

Abstract

This article presents a study that aims to analyze evidence of the frequency effect of verb forms in the context of formal teaching and the production of sentences with the verb gustar in Spanish by Brazilian learners. The literature shows that, when learning a second language, learners transfer structures from the first language, but when there are structural distinctions between these languages, they can produce errors, especially when dealing with forms that have not been taught much or not at all. This is the case with the verb gustar (in Spanish), which is not completely equivalent in usage to gostar (in Portuguese) and is generally taught with an incomplete conjugation. Thus, the hypothesis of this study is that the frequency of conjugated forms in teaching can contribute to the effectiveness of learner’s production. To evaluate this hypothesis, the verb forms were divided into two groups: 1) with third person conjugated forms (gusta and gustan), which are more frequent in teaching; and 2) with first and second person conjugated forms (gusto, gustas, gustáis and gustamos), which are less frequent in teaching. The data was collected in a sentence production task in which the verb form to be used in each sentence was indicated. The results showed faster and more accurate production with the most frequent verb forms (gusta and gustan), and the difference between the groups was statistically significant. This shows that it may be more advantageous for learners if the formal teaching context includes all the conjugated forms of the verb gustar.